Wolf's Plateau

Today is supposed to be the date when Debian 3.0r2 comes out. However, it is postponed because some of the project servers are compromised. Slashdot has a story about this, too. This year doesn't seem to be good for open source software: do you still remember what happend to GNU FTP server and Linux kernel CVS server?

Self-consistent field (SCF) convergence seems to be a big problem for me in Gaussian calculation recently. David Young has a interesting article discussing this problem from a chaos theory point of view and gave some good suggestions for solving it.

Larry McVoy found out someone had broken into the CVS server of Linux kernel and modified the CVS tree directly. The changes are posted and it is soon recognized as a backdoor to get root privilege. KernelTrap has a coverage with more details.